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Ok, I know a couple of people who use TVApps. That's a couple more than I know who want to move their recordings around.

Mike

I don't use TV Apps, but understand there are people who do and don't begrudge them for it. (I used to use the sports score app, but it is so slow to respond I just use my iPhone these days).

I do, however, desperately want the ability to view my archived recordings on any future replacement or upgraded DVR.

I haven't had my box die yet (knock, knock), but both my mother and sister each had boxes die and lost recordings. My sister even pays a premium for MRV and leases FIVE DVR's but when her living room box suddenly died (the first of her HD boxes) none of that helped her view the year's worth of programming recorded to the external attached to that device.

We pay monthly DVR premiums to be able to indefinitely time shift our content. We do not get refunded a dime when we lose that ability due to a failure of leased hardware.

Logically, there is no reason for this. Recordings should have been DRM locked to the customer ACCOUNT from the very beginning, not a specific hardware ID. It wouldn't have cost DirecTV anything more to set it up that way in the beginning. Content providers wouldn't have cared one way or the other.

It might cost something to make the change now, retroactively, but it is a change that should be made. And is worth making. I suspect it wouldn't even be that difficult a change to make.

A commonly misunderstood piece of the "Betamax" decision is that it applied to broadcast (OTA) TV only. There has never been a case brought before the Supreme Court regarding programming not delivered OTA. As noted earlier, it was about time-shifting, not copying or place-shifting.

Since then, though, other laws, such as the DMCA, reduce what rights you might have had regarding recordings of programs, no matter what the source.

Most households now a days have more than 1 DVR, wouldn't it just be easier to have the ability (through MRV) to move the recordings to another DVR, replace the bad reciever, and then move the content back? This seems like a simplier solution and easier for D* to add to the software.

Isn't that enough? You might think the odds are so low of your receiver failing that it doesn't matter, but imagine if you were one of the unlucky ones. How would you feel to loose hundreds of hours of premium content you paid a small fortune for and spent a ridiculous amount of time collecting and maintaining?

Most households now a days have more than 1 DVR, wouldn't it just be easier to have the ability (through MRV) to move the recordings to another DVR, replace the bad reciever, and then move the content back? This seems like a simplier solution and easier for D* to add to the software.

Isn't that enough? You might think the odds are so low of your receiver failing that it doesn't matter, but imagine if you were one of the unlucky ones. How would you feel to loose hundreds of hours of premium content you paid a small fortune for and spent a ridiculous amount of time collecting and maintaining?

...Because of a silly DRM restriction that is totally unnecessary?

No, that isn't enough.

My point was to question whether or not there are enough failures to make it priority for DirecTV.

Like I've said a couple of times in this thread, I think it's a good idea. However, what would it take to make it a priority on DirecTV's part?

I doubt there are enough failed DVRs to make DirecTV to implement something.

There needs to be something else to bring it to the limelight. Otherwise it's a non-starter.

Mike

Edited by Mike Bertelson, 18 October 2010 - 11:08 AM.

µßSince it costs 1.66¢ to produce a penny, my 2¢ worth is really 3.32¢ worth. That 3.32¢ is my own and not the 3.32¢ of DIRECTV, Dish, or anyone else for that matter.

I would feel like an idiot for using the wrong device/medium for this."Hundreds of hours"?DVRs were never made for archiving long term. DVD & Blu-Ray disks are what to use.

Blank blu-ray discs are so expensive, and the process of archiving via disk so labor and TIME intensive that this is not at all a practical solution.

If DVR's weren't meant for archiving, why put a hard drive bigger than 120 GB in one? A 1.5 TB disk holds well over 300 hours of content. I could (and have) copied that to an equivalent replacement drive costing about $100 and the process takes just a few hours.

To archive to disc would take well over 300 hours, and cost an ungodly fortune.

No one has yet explained to me why it would be either difficult or expensive for DirecTV to rewrite their DRM so that recordings are tied to the User Account and not the DVR.

I'm sure any cost incurred would be more than recouped by offering customers a flat, one-time fee to free their existing content from their current box when the time for an upgrade (or a DVR failure) comes around.

Blank blu-ray discs are so expensive, and the process of archiving via disk so labor and TIME intensive that this is not at all a practical solution.[...]To archive to disc would take well over 300 hours, and cost an ungodly fortune.

Are you sure? Blank 25GB Blu-ray discs can be had in quantities of 10 for about $1.40 each. The computer homed burners are getting dangerously close to passing under the $100 mark. As for the time required, I shouldn't take much longer than sum of the the run times of all of the programs to send them to a computer.

This is about what it cost (in time and money) to store a movie or two a few years ago on a DVD recorder or 20 years ago on VHS.

No one has yet explained to me why it would be either difficult or expensive for DirecTV to rewrite their DRM so that recordings are tied to the User Account and not the DVR.

Nobody can explain it. It is just something DIRECTV hasn't seen fit to offer their subscribers.

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. -- JFK

Blank blu-ray discs are so expensive, and the process of archiving via disk so labor and TIME intensive that this is not at all a practical solution.

If DVR's weren't meant for archiving, why put a hard drive bigger than 120 GB in one? A 1.5 TB disk holds well over 300 hours of content. I could (and have) copied that to an equivalent replacement drive costing about $100 and the process takes just a few hours.

To archive to disc would take well over 300 hours, and cost an ungodly fortune.

No one has yet explained to me why it would be either difficult or expensive for DirecTV to rewrite their DRM so that recordings are tied to the User Account and not the DVR.

I'm sure any cost incurred would be more than recouped by offering customers a flat, one-time fee to free their existing content from their current box when the time for an upgrade (or a DVR failure) comes around.

MTBF of 1.5 million hours doesn’t mean a hard drive will last for 171 years before it fails.

What kills hard drives is, well running them. In a DVR the hard drive is running 24/7. This is about as poor a system for long term archiving of video as you could possibly have. Anyone who believes that a DVR is a good means of archiving their video is just plain wrong.

A couple of guys working for Google studied hard drive failures (they’ve got a few of drives over there) and found that...

...once SMART found that a drive was having scan and reallocation errors, that drive was 39 times more likely to fail over a two-month span than a drive that reported no such errors. So, "first errors" are a good sign of failure.

The point is that once it starts to go it will go pretty quickly. This means if you’re using you DVR as your primary source of video and also as the sole means of “backup” you will need to be very diligent in testing the drives to ensure your “archive” is still viable.

However, rule number one of backing up your data has always been to never use the primary working system as your backup. This is an incredible foolish thing to do and saying that since they have a large drive in them means they are meant for archiving is just as foolish. You never, never use the working system as the backup. You know what that called? It’s called not having a backup.

A DVRs sole purpose is to time shift TV programming and nothing more. Expecting DirecTV to give you tools to make it also an archiving system is never gonna happen. Nor is it a very smart way of creating a "backup" of important data. Heck, a Blu-Ray burner can be had for ≈$125-ish and disks are < $2/each. Now that's a backup system.

Mike

Edited by Mike Bertelson, 19 October 2010 - 07:07 AM.

µßSince it costs 1.66¢ to produce a penny, my 2¢ worth is really 3.32¢ worth. That 3.32¢ is my own and not the 3.32¢ of DIRECTV, Dish, or anyone else for that matter.

The largest stock DirecTV drive can hold 100 Hours. Seems like this might cover someone going on vacation.Yes, archiving to disk is time consuming, so one would need to do this much more frequently than to wait until you have "hundreds of hours" to archive.How much time and effort do you spend here:

How would you feel to loose hundreds of hours of premium content you paid a small fortune for and spent a ridiculous amount of time collecting and maintaining.

It's not that I'm trying to promote DirecTV's side on this, but only to suggest/point out what might be different here:DirecTV has to provide assurances to their programing providers that this digital content stays "locked down", or at least they've taken "do diligence" to do so. If they can't do/show this, then the provider will stop providing.DirecTV is merely the middle man here, but must comply with the current laws.What an end user may do is beyond their control, but DirecTV has no interest in making it easy for them.At some point in time, the laws may change or Hollywood may take a different view.I may drive faster than the posted speed limit, but it doesn't make it legal. Maybe I haven't been ticketed, and maybe "everyone else" drives as fast, but this still doesn't change the law.The real issue here is the draconian "digital millenium copyright act" that congress was bought & paid to pass so the Betamax "mistake" doesn't repeat. Since Sony now is a content provider, I don't think you'll be seeing them challenging this law either.

And again we run into the conundrum of allowing content providers and content owners to be one in the same. When Sony provides both the means to copy and the restriction to NOT copy, it means that they control what and how to do the copying. You also run into the fact that in many cases the cable and satellite companies also control content, so it's in their best interest to lock down what the individual can do. Copyright laws are being "winged" as they cannot keep up with the advances of modern technology. And since the money is not with the consumers but with these content providers, it is easy for them to control regulation. Really does it make any sense that you can copy analog, but not digital? A copy is a copy is a copy. The fact that it's easier to proliferate illegal copies digitally should have no bearing on the decision. The sale of said copies is illegal, even if it was on tissue paper. If you can copy via analog, you should be able to copy digitally FOR PERSONAL USE.

Now as far as backing up your HD. That should be allowed, and there's no reason that they couldn't back it up into a format that is incompatible with anything than the host equipment. So, for instance, you back your DVR drive to some external media. They could create something that puts it into a format that the file can only be read from a drive connected to your DVR (either internally or eSata). Or, perhaps a better solution, once bandwidth issues are eliminated, back it up on some server "in the cloud" owned by DirecTV, so that if you have an equipment swap, it will download your content back to the new equipment. Then D* can control your content fully and still provide a backup service. As someone who had a faulty eSata cable and would lose content every time my DVR rebooted, that would have been a godsend.

Yeah, this is getting a bit off topic. I have backed up my DVR's hard drive on occasion (which is easy enough to do with a Gparted disc), and having two working hard drives with basically the same long-term data set on them is fine enough a backup solution for me.

The problem comes with the part I CAN'T control. The DVR itself. If it blows a capacitor, or it's power supply fails, or anything else in it's hardware decides to stop working ... it doesn't matter that I've backed up the hard drive. If the DVR can't boot, I can't watch my content. DirecTV will happily replace the bad DVR, but you still can't watch your content - it is all encrypted and DRM tied to that specific piece of hardware.

It could just as easily be tied to the customer account. If it was, it could be played back on any DVR authorized on that account. No content providers would have had any problems with that, as any subscriber could have ORIGINALLY watched and recorded their content on any of the other DVR's on their account anyway (if they had any).

So basically, this was just a simple lack of foresight by whoever wrote the original encryption controls. I'm still convinced it would be an easy oversight to correct. DirecTV pushes software updates all the time. I don't see why this simple change couldn't be included in one of them.

So basically, this was just a simple lack of foresight by whoever wrote the original encryption controls. I'm still convinced it would be an easy oversight to correct. DirecTV pushes software updates all the time. I don't see why this simple change couldn't be included in one of them.

First off, I agree with everyone here that keying the recordings to the account rather than the machine makes perfect sense. Had it been set up this way in the first place, all would be fine. But we all now have a bunch of data that was recorded under the original system. I suspect the fix for this isn't perfectly straight forward, as it has to be implemented without invalidating all our existing recordings.

I have no idea what the data format is, but there is probably a fixed-length field for the receiver ID number. If this field is not large enough for the account ID, then it would not just be a simple matter of recording the account ID number on recordings from now on, and doing a simple OR test to compare the field data with the machine and account IDs.

Probably most of the people that think that have absolutely no idea what could be involved in changing the code to accommodate that change.

I will most certainly admit to that. But I believe that there have been posts saying that Dish ties recording to the customer account and that external drives can be moved from one dvr to another.If _Dish_ can do that, I believe that D* could do it if they wanted to. (After all, D* is much better and smarter, IMO, than Dish.)

Remember, when it comes to audio/video, more is always better. (This does NOT apply to remote controls!)

I will most certainly admit to that. But I believe that there have been posts saying that Dish ties recording to the customer account and that external drives can be moved from one dvr to another.If _Dish_ can do that, I believe that D* could do it if they wanted to. (After all, D* is much better and smarter, IMO, than Dish.)

I don't think anyone is saying that DirecTV can't do it. If they are then they're not correct.

However, it is much more difficult than most people thnk to change what's already been done then it is to start from scratch. That's all I was trying to say.

Mike

Edited by Mike Bertelson, 20 October 2010 - 12:17 PM.

µßSince it costs 1.66¢ to produce a penny, my 2¢ worth is really 3.32¢ worth. That 3.32¢ is my own and not the 3.32¢ of DIRECTV, Dish, or anyone else for that matter.

I don't think anyone is saying that DirecTV can't do it. If they are then they're not correct.

However, it is much more difficult than most people thnk to change what's already been done then it is to start from scratch. That's all I was trying to say.

Mike

+1

I could see it happening say in the next generation of dvrs, but it may just not be feasible with the current platform without a total code re-write for the HR series. Was it even possible with the older Direct HDTivo's? I know there was some hacked firmware for some of the older tivo's that could be used to more easily get at the recordings, but thats not really what we're talking about here.

This thread isnt really even titled correctly, we're not talking about copying software here, this is much more akin to being able to copy something like streaming netflix, which if it was possible to do, that delivery system would get overhauled virtually immediately. D* is a digital stream that within their closed system you can receive in your home, and digitally store for shifted viewing or at a much later date...It isnt and has never been meant as a way for anyone to amass huge libraries of material that they can transfer to a different medium or format, which of course would mean someone would try to freely distribute it. This stuff doesnt fall under any reasonable definition of fair use or personal use, no matter how much someone thinks it should.

Well, I have 7 DVRs and 3 of those DVRs Backup the other 4 DVRs in case one Fails.

With MRV I can always access either the Primary Recording or the Designated Backup Recording until I decide that I don't need either the Backup or the Primary.

Very simple operation and it also allow me to have 350 Series Links and 13,000 Gigibytes of Storage Capacity and the Ability to Backup those Recordings I deem necessary to keep and watch later on down the road.

I don't have to spend time offloading material to a DVD and besides you can only record to DVD in 480p so why bother. With MRV it is easily accessible and my 3 DVRs cost me less than $200 thanks to an offer from Directv.

RICH584 does the same thing for Archiving as he has 12 DVRs and 18.5 Terabytes of Storage Capacity so we are pleased with out Archival Process.

Everyone seems to think that the feature they want is just a simple matter of writing some code an pushing it to the boxes.

I would guess that much of the heavy lifting of using files recorded on another DVR had to be done to make WHDS work. It doesn't seem like a huge departure to reseed the decryption hardware with the key from the recording DVR when doing local playback versus WHDS playback.

It might also limit the embarrassment of sending out "refurbished" DVRs with content left on them.

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. -- JFK

One example I could think of, and it’s one that gets thrown out pretty regularly when this topic comes up, would be if I wanted to upgrade all my HR21/2/3's to HR24's. If I could copy the existing shows to an external drive, I could then replace all my old DVR without having worry about losing my existing recordings. Hopefully the process would be 2-way, so when I got the new receiver, I could put the shows from the external drive back on the new device.

I've never personally thought of my DVR as a media to store movies I wanted to keep. It's strictly a time shifting device (for me). I started out "life" with a collection of movies on VHS tape, hundreds of movies (better than collecting cats I suppose). Couple years ago I decided to move those movies over to DVD, but the media was so old that the "project" was an utter failure.

Since those early days though, I started "collecting" movies on DVD (some now on Blu-Ray). The use of a DVR and a DVD recorder made that collecting easier, as did getting/copying DVD's in the mail from Netflix. I buy Blu-Rays, but not many....

But then as I started utilizing D*'s VOD and Netflix streaming services a LOT, I started thinking about what I was doing.....I pay for all the premium channels, with DVR service and my DVR hooked up to the internet I've got tons of stuff on VOD.....and now with Netflix I'm streaming just about any title I can think of, and getting the rest on DVD in the mail.....

So...why am I still collecting hard copies of anything. I'm able to watch just about anything I please either instantly or within a couple days.....